With emergence of communication services, the amount of data in communication networks has increased with time. To meet user demands for as well increased communication capacity and fast communication, new access technologies have been developed. In transport networks, such as aggregation networks or access networks, transport network nodes will then be capable of transporting user data originating from different access technologies within the same transport network.
FIG. 1 which is a schematic overview illustrates an aggregation node 100 which is a router of a transport network, receives packet data according to two different access technologies (LTE and UMTS) from two respective network nodes 120 to which network communication devices 122 are connected. The aggregation node 100 is arranged to transport the received packet data into a core network.
The term “network communication device” will be used throughout this description to denote any device which is capable of network communications. The term network communication device may thus include any device, which may be used by a user for network communications. Accordingly, the term network communication device may alternatively be referred to as a mobile terminal, a terminal, a user terminal (UT), a user equipment (UE), a wireless terminal, a wireless communication device, a wireless transmit/receive unit (WTRU), a mobile phone, a cell phone, a table computer, a smart phone, etc. In addition, the term network communication devices, may further relate to fixed connected devices of a communication network, such as terminals, computers, etc. of a LAN (Local Area Network) or public switched network. Yet further, the term wireless communication device includes MTC (Machine Type Communication) devices, which do not necessarily involve human interaction. MTC devices are sometimes referred to as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) devices.
Different communication technologies have different access times. For instance an RTT (round trip time) of LTE (Long Term Evolution) is substantially lower than a round trip of UMTS (Universal Mobile Telephony System). When different access technologies are sharing common transport networks, the access technologies that have longer RTT will get a problem with the throughput, due to TCP inherent mechanisms. It has been experienced in shared networks between UMTS and LTE that the UMTS technology is starving while LTE takes most of the capacity for e.g. the best effort traffic.
Adding to the complexity is when traffic is sent in encrypted tunnels, e.g. IPSec (Internet Protocol Security), and all information from within the packets are hidden, thus it's impossible to perform any fairness scheduling per technology and per user.
Thus there is a problem to satisfactory allocate transport resources in shared communication networks.